Posted!

Kent Peppler, 4th generation Mead farmer, is here to stay

Kent Peppler, a farmer in Mead, has rented water from the city of Fort Collins in the past but has not heard from city officials on rental for this year. He is waiting to plant corn as he waits. On the left is a wheat field.
(Photo:
V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan
)Buy Photo

On Tuesday, Kent Peppler was riding a tractor, cutting corn in a field east of Mead. But on Thursday, the lifelong Northern Colorado resident sat among a select group of people tasked with solving the problem of oil and gas development in Colorado.

As a fourth-generation farmer, the 55-year-old Peppler straddles many worlds as one of the few family farmers left in Mead, a town of some 2,000 people along the Interstate 25 corridor between Denver and Loveland. Peppler works land that his family has owned for almost 70 years, but he has also seen Northern Colorado’s farming industry transform from a landscape of family-owned plots into home subdivisions and oil and gas well pads.

“There is only a few of us,” said Peppler of the dwindling family farmer populations around Mead. “There is only a few owner-operators in the neighborhood.”

Peppler wears many hats — he has been the president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union since 2006, but has worked with young farmers associations and the federal Farm Service Agency, among others. Recently, he’s added a new title to the list: member of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s oil and gas task force.

In 1945, Peppler’s grandparents bought some land north of Mead, and Peppler himself grew up a block away. To this day, Peppler can still point out the yellow house where he grew up and the rusted basketball hoop where he played ball downtown. Peppler still farms wheat on the land, and his grandparents’ white house still stands, but its backdrop has changed. Once a spot where the family kept its cattle pens, the Mead field now shares space with eight well heads, a few tank batteries and some wheat.

Four years ago, Peppler and some other local farmers decided to sell their mineral rights after they were approached by an oil and gas company. It’s an odd balance for a farmer whose fields depend on the same water that oil companies use in hydraulic fracturing, a controversial oil and gas extraction technique used to unlock oil and gas 10,000 feet underground.

“I’ve had a lot of experience over the years dealing with oil and gas issues,” said Peppler. “I’ve been a farmer with no say at all, been a partial mineral owner and a surface owner. And I’ve been a total mineral owner and a surface owner.”

It’s Peppler’s background, perhaps, that got him a seat on Hickenlooper’s oil and gas commission, a group of 21 people hand-picked from hundreds of applicants by the governor’s staff to study oil and gas development in the state. Created as a last-minute compromise to scratch four oil and gas-related measures from the November ballot, the commission has six months to come up with suggestions to give to the governor and the legislature.

Peppler is one of a handful of people on the commission representing Northern Colorado, where the lion’s share of oil and gas development in Colorado is booming.

Dale Karlin, vice president of the Larimer County Farmers Union, thinks Peppler’s diverse background makes him an excellent choice for the commission — as a farmer, Peppler understands the need for land and water, but as a mineral rights owner, he is familiar with the needs of oil and gas.

“He’s protective of everybody’s rights, at least that’s what he’s always demonstrated to me,” said Karlin, who added she has known Peppler for five years. “But he’s also very interested in sustaining the planet for the long term. And he’s not afraid to go out and dig into the science of something.”

Colorado farmers such as Peppler are caught in a web of environmental and industrial issues, which include oil and gas development, rail transport and the ever-evolving battle for water.

The disappearance of family-operated farms such as Peppler’s from Northern Colorado is a huge problem, said Karlin. Small farms have to compete economically with so-called Big Ag, Karlin said, but also have to vie for space on railroad cars for their produce, space that has been swamped by oil and gas transport.

Some farmers have opted to sell out, cashing in valuable water rights in exchange for a more mainstream life not tied to the land. It’s a gamble that doesn’t work for everyone, said Tom Cech, director of the One World One Water Center in Denver.

“If you don’t have value in your water rights, then you are just in a tough situation,” said Cech. “Most farmers don’t have valuable water rights. And this is people’s 401K.”

When taking a drive around Mead, Peppler can recite the story of the area’s transformed farming landscape. Longtime farming neighbors have sold property to subdivision developers, who build homes to support the area’s growing population fed by oil and gas jobs.

But Peppler, at least, is there to stay. His 18-year-old son, Tyson, has started studying agricultural business at Colorado State University this fall and has every intention of continuing the family tradition of farming in Mead.